From the wild rose-bush, just a skeleton,
there hangs a nest. How in the spring
bursts from it, filling all the air,
the twitter of the chattering housemates!
Now there’s but one small feather. At the wooing
of the wind it hesitates, beats lightly;
like to some ancient dream in soul severe
that ever flies and yet is never fled.
And now the eye turns downward from the heavens—
the heavens to which one last full harmony
rose glorious, and died into the air—
and fixes on the earth, on which the leaves
lie rotting; whilst in waves the wind
weeps through the lonely country.
We must not close this most inadequate notice of the _Myricæ_ without
mentioning the refined tenderness of one of the closing poems, too
long to quote, entitled “_Colloquio_.” The poet’s mother, a figure of
infinite sweetness, mute and shadowy, yet real, revisits the familiar
house-places with her son; and a few incidental touches put before us
an idyllic sketch of the home with its plants and the two housewifely
sisters, so different in character.
As a contrast to the details of the _Myricæ_ we may here quote a
poem that appeared (December 1897) in the _Nuova Antologia_. Breadth
of silent space has as great a fascination for Pascoli as have the
tender details of home and country life. He had already in one of the
“_Poemetti_” dwelt with longing on the northern regions whither the
wild swans fly, where the _aurora borealis_ lights up the infinite
polar gloom, where mountains of eternal ice rest on the sea as on a
pavement; and Andrée’s balloon expedition to the Pole especially fired
his imagination. The poem that bears the traveller’s name was written
when, after long silence, there was a report that human cries had
been heard on the Sofjord. In the Italian, the first part, broken
by questionings and doubtings has an effect of uncertainty, like the
uneasy straining of the balloon at its rope; from it the second part
rises with a sure, strong leap and sinks gently at the end.